25 Years Ago Today I Launched My Website - Fri, 7 Jan 2022

Happy 25th birthday to my lkessler.com website! On January 7, 1997, I added my initial content to my website for public view.

Technically, it became available August 27 the year before, but that was only a “Coming Soon” page and 2 test pages. So January 7 is the official launch date.

My first pages Included sections for My Genealogy Pages, My Family Research, Cemetery Photography Project, Beginning Genealogy, The Genealogical Institute, the Jewish Historical Society, J-GEMS, My Stars, Your Last Stop, and Behold.

So there was even then, a heavy emphasis for genealogy, a bit of family stuff, and a page for my then-in-development genealogy program Behold.

The Internet Archive has 497 snapshots of my home page between 1999 and 2021. The earliest snapshot was on Jan 25, 1999 and this is what it looked like then:

At that time in 1999, I was thinking of writing a search program and offline browser, but that never came to fruition, and I went back to developing Behold.

My lkessler.com site doesn’t style-wise look very much different today.

Over the years, I added a lot of content.

• I memorialized my chess program Brute Force with its own page and have a chess player for the games it played.
• I had fun with my daughters developing fan pages for two of the TV shows they enjoyed: Mummies Alive and the New Addams Family. Having the fan sites enabled us to interview producers and actors from the shows who allowed us to print their interviews which was quite exciting. We created a webpage called SOMA (Supporters of Mummies Alive) to work with other fans of Mummies Alive who had webpages for the show, joining them in a webring.
• I maintained a My Family Research page which has information about the families I’m genealogically interested in. Through search engines, the many surnames on that page have led hundreds of people to contact me, and many were actual relatives who I was able to exchange information with.
• In the 2010’s, when I became a genealogy speaker, I added my speaker topics page.

I also developed several pages and continue to maintain and make available weblinks on various topics that were and are of interest to me. They include:

• Jewish Genealogy Links
• Jewish Winnipeg Links
• Chess and Computer Chess Links
• Computer Chess Books
• Genealogy Program Links

In 2008, I rebuilt my Genealogy Program Links page into a software review and rating site and gave it its own website:  www.gensoftreviews.com 

In 2008, I also moved my Behold pages to their own site at: www.beholdgenealogy.com

Over the 25 years, I have meticulously maintained a list of all the changes I’ve made to my websites as well as an annual summary of my activities.

It’s been a good 25 years. Hopefully I can keep this up for 25 more.

And don’t forget:  Cheryl’s very important message!